Housing: Underoccupancy Charge

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Monday 18th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, clearly there are issues with housing. There is a great deal of overcrowding. There are various figures for this but between 250,000 and approaching 400,000 homes are overcrowded, and there are long waiting lists. Also, the economic signals seem odd. The provision of single-bedroomed homes falls very far short of demand, with 61% of people wanting, or meeting the size requirements for, one-bedroomed accommodation.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, has the noble Lord seen a report in one of my local newspapers, the Haringey Independent, where one Di Alexander, who chairs a housing association and happens to be the father of the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said that the bedroom tax,

“is particularly unfair in that it penalises both our tenants and ourselves for not being able to magic up a supply of smaller properties”?

Has the noble Lord also seen the report of the Chartered Institute of Housing on the pilots of capping benefits in the London Borough of Haringey? It points out that,

“2,300 children live in households whose income has been capped”,

resulting in,

“instability in education, increasing tensions within the home, sudden relocation and loss of social and educational opportunities or networks”,

which, it says, is extremely serious. Will he comment on the fact that, according to that study, the cost to local authorities and others of achieving a saving of £60,000 per week was £960,000 over just a four-month period? Does that really make sense?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, it is simply too early to reach judgments about how the introduction of the benefit cap and the removal of the spare room subsidy bed in. The kind of savings that we were looking for from those policies seems to be being borne out by the very early initial figures that we are now seeing.